Automated plant control systems (e.g., TDC 3000 Industrial Automation Systems manufactured by, and commercially available from, Honeywell Incorporated of Phoenix, Ariz.) include a comprehensive set of algorithms and auxiliaries to control and monitor various processes within, for instance, a manufacturing facility. The control systems can be tailored to satisfy a wide range of process requirements globally or within specified portions of the facility. Conventionally, the control systems include a plurality of modules, each having its own processor or firmware, linked together by a communication bus thereby resulting in a distributed process control system. The distributed nature of the system affords high performance with the capability to expand the system incrementally to satisfy growth or modifications in the facility.
A first objective of automated plant management is to provide a control scheme that synthesizes plant-wide control of all processes therein to improve an overall efficiency of the facility. A second objective is to couple the control scheme to the facility by providing a real time data acquisition and monitoring scheme that monitors the operation of the facility by collecting historical and real time data and responding to deviations from desired operation that may arise and displaying the data for the benefit of a user.
The process of designing these robust systems has been one of incremental evolution. At first, process control systems were designed and implemented for particular plants. As is easily imagined, such a system was very time and cost consuming. Later, companies, such as Honeywell, began developing configurable, or tailorable, process control systems. These systems were typically distributed, as set forth above, and included configurable logic that could be programmed to implement a particular plant's control strategy.
Engineers were typically tasked with the chore of analyzing a plant's design, or the actual plant, if it already existed. Analysis was often based on visual interpretation, typically using a "fill-in-the-form" type of approach to produce control drawings for the system and the plant. The control drawings typically included the various elements making up the plant and the process control system, including valves, vats, thermocouples, pressure gauges, pressure switches, etc., and delineated the point connections associating the elements.
Human errors inevitably occur, a valve is forgotten, the parameters of a vat are miscalculated, the threshold of a pressure gauge is transposed, etc. These errors, however, typically go unnoticed until implementation of the same, or, worse, the process control system goes on-line and is tested. The engineer is then tasked with back-checking the project to correct the plant's or the process control system's design, causing plant down-time, loss of revenues, waste of plant personnel resources or the like.
What is needed in the art therefore is a way of automatically generating control drawings from the point connections and control language scripts of a process control system.